For Utahns who have curbside recycling, it’s easy to take it for granted.
In St. George, for example, trucks roll up every other week to empty blue recycling bins so residents can save their cereal boxes and soda bottles from going to the landfill.
It’s not that easy, though, in neighboring Iron County – and a KUER listener wanted to know why.
For Cedar City and its nearly 40,000 residents, the lack of a public recycling program comes down to money.
“We're so rural here that there's no local way of recycling here to make it profitable. And it'll never be [profitable] here,” said Superintendent of Streets and Solid Waste Eric Witzke.
Cedar City used to offer recycling with a handful of drop-off locations around town. The service was discontinued on Jan. 1, 2020, because of increasing costs. Witzke called all the work a big undertaking.
“There was a constant battle trying to keep those areas clean,” he said. “People don't always put stuff in the right bins like they're supposed to. So then they contaminated the load, and then the loads ended up at the landfill.”
Iron County operates the local landfill in Cedar City and doesn’t accept recycling beyond a few specific items, such as tires, metal and tree trimmings. So, if residents want to recycle household waste today, the only option might be to pay a private company — but that can get pricey.
In St. George, curbside recycling through the county adds about $6 to a monthly utility bill. A similar service in Cedar City with a company called Recyclops costs four times as much. The price tag is about the same to get Recyclops service in Kane County.
With each of these options, the recyclables all end up in the same St. George hub where Washington County sends its material. And that’s not the final destination.
Even southwest Utah’s largest city, St. George, has to cross state lines to give its milk jugs and tin cans a new life.
“They go to a material recycling facility in North Las Vegas,” said Washington County Solid Waste District Manager Kevin Kunz. “It's really an impressive operation.”

Although Washington County’s population now tops 200,000, it still doesn’t have a local processing center. So Kunz said they send two or three semi-trucks filled with recyclables on the 116-mile trek to Nevada each day.
“It's a constant flow because every day we're collecting that material from somewhere in the county,” Kunz said. “We don't want it to accumulate too much or too long here.”
In addition to Washington County’s curbside service, it has around 30 recycling drop-off locations across the county — from a rodeo grounds parking lot in Hurricane to an intersection next to a cemetery in New Harmony that’s less than three miles from the Iron County border.
While it might seem tempting for residents from other counties to drive over and dump their recyclables in one of those bins, Kunz said that’s not technically allowed. He compares it to someone putting their garbage in a commercial dumpster behind an office building.
“We don't have a guard station there to check licenses, but the purpose is not for Iron County. The purpose is for Washington County because they're the residents that are paying for it.”
Even with St. George’s streamlined curbside system, there are still plenty of misunderstandings about it.
Glass, for instance, can not go in curbside containers and needs to be taken to the county’s drop-off sites. That’s because if the glass breaks as it’s loaded into the truck, the tiny shards can mix with other materials.
The best way to know if your plastic is recyclable in Washington County, Kunz said, is to give it the “poke test.” If it’s soft enough for you to push your finger through, then it should go in the trash. That includes plastic grocery bags, which people often mistakenly put in recycling bins. Right now, there isn’t a way to recycle soft plastic in Washington County, he said, because it jams up the sorting equipment.
Misinformation is another problem.
“There's a lot of rumors that we actually don't recycle — that our recycling just goes into the landfill,” Kunz said. “That's just not true.”
Several years ago, he said there was a short time when Washington County’s recycling processor stopped accepting items, so the county had to temporarily bury recyclables with the rest of its garbage.
“I think it probably started a rumor that we never recycled, and we still don't recycle,” Kunz said. “It's hard to get that fixed.”
These challenges illustrate why smaller communities like Cedar City may find it hard to run a public recycling program.
Even when Cedar City offered drop-off sites, Witzke said the bins were an extension of Washington County’s program. That meant the neighboring county sent trucks to pick them up and take them to St. George.
It’s possible the state of Utah could step in to help extend recycling services to more rural residents. Colorado, for instance, passed a law in 2022 to create a statewide recycling program to process packaging and paper products funded by fees from companies that produce those one-time-use items.
Even with more population growth on the horizon, however, Witzke thinks it’s unlikely a public recycling program will start back up in Cedar City.
But that could change — if enough people ask for it.
“It comes right down to [the] city council,” he said. “That's something that the residents would have to request and see if they can't get city council to change that point of view.”